March 7, Post 6

3:01 a.m.

As Dustin Hoffman (as a character apparently called Benjamin Braddock) once told us, "I’m just a little worried about my future.”  Except, it doesn’t feel like it’s the Future that I’m concerned about. It’s more the terror that I’ll die before the Future is ever the present; that I’ll either have lived my whole life chasing the Events that refuse to begin. That’s why the seconds terrify me. I can't watch the clock; it makes me need to scream. Stop for 30 seconds, 2 minutes, whatever – and just watch the second hand of a clock. Try it, and you'll see what I mean. It’s relentless. It’s cold, inhuman, uncaring – and not real. It’s the fact that it didn't have to be like this that bothers me, I think. We could have chosen anything for the basal unit of time, but we chose this quick, controlled (maddeningly controlled!) "second" that constantly calls your attention ("tick!"), only to disappear into the next second ("tock."), and so (tick) on (tick) and so on (tock)  until you (tick) can’t take it any (tock) more and you (tick) feel that you (tock) have to either look (tick) away or you’ll go (tock) mad, or cry, or (tick) scream, or something (tock)  – something. 

So no, it’s not the future that worries me; it’s the present that is constantly threatening to become the future and never does that’s keeping me awake at night.  That's why this project is important to me. I don't understand how to make it from one moment into the next and neither does Roquentin, and neither, I think, does Revel, but there must be something between the two treatments of the problem that will help me understand the problem, and once I can put it into words, the problem will necessarily be less than it is now, unspoken, unknown, unlimited. 

Hospital office, TN - 23 March 2013.